Canon City News

Wal-Mart to promote 25,000 and add 55,000 seasonal holiday associates

Wal-Mart will hire 55,000 seasonal workers nationwide for the holiday season, including a little more than 500 in Colorado, the retailer will announce Tuesday.

That compares to approximately 50,000 seasonal workers the company said it would add before the holidays last year nationwide and the 500 it hired in Colorado during the 2012 holiday season.

In addition, Wal-Mart also said it will promote 25,000 U.S. associates before the end of the year.

Some of those "surprise promotions" are to be announced Tuesday in Denver by Ben Hassing, senior vice president of the mountain division of Wal-Mart. In the Denver area, Wal-Mart has promoted 573 hourly associates this year to supervisory roles and 73 hourly associates to salaried management roles, Hassing said.

He said that in an average year, Wal-Mart promotes 160,000 associates across the United States.

"Denver has been a really good market for us. This year in Colorado we've opened 16 stores, and in the Denver market alone we've opened 10 new neighbor markets — and we have another two coming this week.

That means we've added directly 1,000 jobs in the Denver market related to the new store openings," Hassing said.

Hassing noted that, in addition, Wal-Mart is adding jobs to the existing stores in Colorado.